


The Kindest Knife

by mehramilo



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fade Shenanigans, Human Cole (Dragon Age), Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Cole (Dragon Age), Past Lavellan/Solas, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Pre-Trespasser, Purple Prose, Romantic Angst, Solas Angst, Spirit Cole (Dragon Age), not how any of this works, not how spirits work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-04-14 20:43:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14144178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mehramilo/pseuds/mehramilo
Summary: The Inquisitor failed to attend the Exalted Council. Cole wants to help find out why.





	The Kindest Knife

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to Oscar Wilde for lifting the title off him.

Cole sits at an empty table in a corner of the taproom where even the longest fingers of firelight cannot reach. The world is quieter now that he is cut off from the spirit’s power, but it’s still nice to feel unseen sometimes. He watches Maryden as she plays, seated before the fire in a pool of light with her lute cradled in her lap, filmed in dust from the road but still beautiful.

They all had been so frightened when he told them he was leaving with the singer. “Being human’s one thing,” Varric had said. “But love? Even those of us with practice mess that one up, kid.” When Cole had asked him to explain, he’d added: “We hurt each other with the best of intentions—it’s kind of our thing.” He still hadn’t quite understood, but the dwarf had merely patted him on the shoulder and said, “You’ll see.”

“ _Once we were_ ,” Maryden sings, shaking him from his thoughts, “ _not afraid of the night_.”

When the innkeep approaches to offer supper, he only catches a whisper of her sorrows— _turnips all gone brown again_ —before it is drowned out in the roar of the crowd, the clash of tankards, the plunking of Mayden’s lute. It’s better this way, he thinks, as the old woman sets the meal before him and holds out her hand for coin, and it’s not like he can’t help without hearing. He gives her a silver coin in return for the food and thrills to see a bright, pure smile crack her weathered face. “Too kind, ser,” she says, dipping a curt bow before shuffling back to the bar. She will send her husband to market for fresh fare tomorrow—he can sense it, just at the edges of his thoughts.

Eating is still such a strange pleasure to Cole, even after all these years. He is still conscious of his tongue and must slide it out of the way to keep from clipping it with his teeth as he chews. He ducks his head and closes his eyes, savoring the taste of hearth and home and the buzz of the inn around him. A serving girl titters as she slides between tables, trailing the scent of freshly baked bread and a breath of perfume behind her like the kiss of spring. Wind brushes against the windows as Maryden swings into a rousing rendition of “Fall of the Magister.” Many of the patrons clap when they recognize the song; a few beat their fists to the tabletops and whistle and cheer. A group of men clacks their tankards together and roars “ _darkness never will rise again_ ” along with Maryden. They still remember the day the sky broke, he thinks: the weeping wound, the torn Veil. Old eyes and older scars.

“They still speak the Herald’s name in their evening prayers.”

At the sound of the voice, Cole opens his eyes and finds a cloaked man standing before him. With his back to the fire, the place where the stranger’s face should be under his hood is nothing but a void. He gestures to the empty chair across from Cole and asks, “May I sit?”

“Yes,” Cole says hesitantly. The man’s fur cloak pools around him as he settles into the seat. Even under all those furs, Cole can tell the man is thin, as hollow and angular and shadowed in sorrow as this body was when it left the Spire. Thinking him one of the wandering brothers who beg meals in exchange for a blessing, Cole pushes his plate across to the stranger and says, “You should have this. It will make you feel less empty.”

The man huffs a laugh. “Thank you for the offer, but it’s yours.” He pushes the dish back across the table with a pale hand. “Have you been on the road long?”

“We were in Antiva in the spring, but Maryden wanted to come back here before the snows. Old Man Wyle likes to hear the songs.” He nods at a withered man hunched over a bowl of stew on the opposite side of the room. “‘The Girl in Red Crossing’ is his favorite. His wife used to sing it over the hearth while she cooked. It helps him forget he is old.”

“ _I've dreamed of the kiss I stole beneath the arbor; I've dreamed of the promise beneath the old ash tree_ ,” the stranger recites in his odd lilt. “A sad tale. I’m quite fond of it, all the same.”

“I like _Ballad of Nuggins_ the best,” Cole says with a smile.

“A good choice.” The stranger pauses a moment; Cole can feel the man staring at him from the dark. Finally, he says, “You have not been to Skyhold in quite some time, I take it.”

Cole’s stomach twists at this turn in the conversation, his dinner turned to sickening lead in his stomach. He remembers Cullen’s warning about Tevinter spies and feels foolish for having humored this stranger. “Why do you want to know?” he asks.

“The Inquisitor.” The stranger’s hood slackens from around his head as he leans closer, and Cole can just make out the sharp line of his jaw in the guttering candlelight, a dark divot pressed into his chin. “What have you heard of her since you left?”

Long ago, before he was truly human, Cole would have heard the man’s thoughts crashing like waves around him; now, there is nothing but a muted hissing noise like rain in the treetops, a few flashes of memory: a taste of tea and tears, a moon, a mirror with two sides. It doesn’t make sense like it used to. “Who are you?” he must ask instead.

“You saw the truth of who I was, once. But I forget that you are no longer a spirit, half in the Fade.” Slowly, the stranger raises his hands to his hood and draws it back, exposing the gleaming curve of his skull, the blades of his ears, those sad eyes. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“You’ve come back,” Cole breathes. He remembers finding the Inquisitor in the dark drum of the painted tower, lifting her from where she lay curled on the carpet, and whispering _forget_ again and again, but the word had lost its power. He hadn’t forgotten the elf, either: the one who had helped make him whole. “She looked for you, Solas—hunting, hoping, but always wanting. You _hurt_ them.”

Solas closes his eyes and purses his lips as if swallowing some bitter tonic. “I know,” he says.

“Are you going back to the castle, then?” A finger of hope flares in his chest at the thought. “It was almost empty when we left, but Cullen’s there, and Josephine, too. She’d be pleased to see you—for the marks to make sense again. We could travel to Skyhold together. Maryden would like your stories.”

Solas shakes his head. “I cannot return.”

“Oh,” he says, deflated. Cole glances over Solas’s shoulder and notices the innkeep is watching them as she dries a tankard with a rag. She has spotted the nonhuman ears and now suspects. He does not need to read her thoughts to know she will call the guards if Solas does not leave soon. “They still taste the bitter buckets drawn from the well here—the children, sleeping soundly, won’t rouse from their beds. Poison in the water: they still think it was the elves that did it. Why are you here? It’s not safe for you.”

“I received word your singer was performing here tonight,” Solas says lightly, “and came in search of you.”

“Me?” Cole eyes widen. “I-I used to be parted in two places, carrying the Fade across, but now I’m just me and can’t see into the brightness. Why would you find me now?”

“Once, you sought to help those who hurt, Cole. Is that still the case, or have you abandoned this in your desire to become a man?”

“I still try,” he says timidly, peering at Solas from under the brim of his hat, “but I’m different now, since you went away. I can’t hear what needs to be healed anymore. It’s like — like trying to listen to sand shift at the bottom of a lake. I don’t know what you need.”

“An act of compassion,” Solas says, pressing his lips together in a thin smile, “or perhaps merely a favor from an old friend.”

Cole can feel some bright pain in the elf, a question so close to the surface but secreted away, like a coin tucked under the tongue. “I want to make things better,” he says with a slow nod. “I want to help.”

Solas slips his hood back over his pale crown and rises from his seat. “Then come with me,” he says, and leads Cole through the press of bodies and out into the night.

***

“We will not be disturbed here,” Solas says, leading him into stables behind the inn. The horses whicker and stamp as Solas lights a torch, dispelling the muzzy darkness with a wave of his hand. Shadows dance on the stable walls; motes of dust glitter in the flickering light as they drift down from the loft, swirling in eddies of night breeze.

Cole lingers by the stalls, watching the horses’ breath steam in the cool air. He had never been allowed inside the stables at Skyhold (Dennet always claimed he scared the beasts), but he had been able to smell them when he stood downwind in the bailey. The air is heavy with the same scents here: dung and sweet hay and wood shavings. He sidles up to one of the roans and tentatively touches the back of his hand to its muzzle, laughing as it wuffles into the sleeve of his shirt. Solas looks on in silence, his hands folded at the small of his back.

“Do beasts speak their sorrows to you as we do?” he asks finally, shaking Cole from his reverie.

“In a way.” Cole ducks his head and shuffles over, wringing his hands like a scolded child. “The grass the groom feeds them is too grey, and they cannot see the sky when they’re locked in here. They only wanted a smell of the fields, a memory of home.”

A smile flickers across Solas’s lips. “Not so different from our desires, then.”

“I guess, but I don’t want any hay. It tastes like trees smell when they don’t want to give up their leaves.” He hefts himself up onto a stack of bales and sits there, kicking his heels against the side. “You asked me to help you.”

“I did.” Solas paces in silence for a moment before continuing: “How long has it been since you last saw the Inquisitor?”

Cole screws up his face and looks up at the ceiling as he tries to remember. The last he had seen her, she had followed Maryden and him from Skyhold’s gate to the end of the crumbling bridge, her feet bare in the snow. _Dareth shiral_ , she had said, laughing as she ducked under the brim of his hat to press a kiss to his cheek. The snows had melted and rolled in again since. “Two years, I think. Maryden is better at remembering the time. She’s always counting when she plays her songs.”

“And the Divine? She has not contacted you?”

“No.” He shudders to remember the woman with her hair afire in the sunlight, as bright as any spirit in her white robes. “She left before I did, with a song of glory and the taste of plum brandy on her tongue.”

“As I suspected.”

A sense of power and dread flickers at the edges of Cole’s mind like dry lightning on a distant horizon. Goosebumps flare along his arms and the back of his neck. “Why do you ask me about her? About them? I don’t know things anymore,” he whines.

“I received word the Divine called the Exalted Council,” Solas says, “to address the masses in the halls of old. I had thought to meet the Inquisitor there—to speak with her, provide her counsel. To heal the mark that burned her.” Solas turns to him. “But she did not attend.”

“She’s still in Skyhold, isn’t she?”

“As I thought, but my eyes in the castle reported no sign of her. I sent scouts to distant cities and dales, yet still I had no answer. I slept, then, seeking her call in the depths of the Fade. I walked the paths well tread in her dreams but saw no sign of her on the road. If she dreamt, it was in stranger lands than those. A spirit of Diligence pointed me to the black horizons, toward lands even I scarce dared to wander, yet I followed. Still, I found nothing. If I were going to find her, I would need to know what happened while I was away—to see her memories, or that of her remaining advisers.” When he peers up at Cole, his eyes are softer, sadder, lambent in the darkness. “I would need to know her mind.”

Cole remembers the way others’ thoughts used to flutter into his consciousness like moths in the night, guiding him to those once lost. “That’s how I found her at Haven,” he says with a nod. “But everyone’s too far away for me to hear now, and this place sings too loudly. What did _you_ hear when you listened?”

Solas shakes his head. “I have learned many things from my time in the Fade, yet even I do not have the power to see the weft of thoughts and memories—an ability _you_ once possessed, when you were more spirit than man.” He lifts a hand up to the light, and Cole notices the amulet laid across his palm, the bright gem cupped there. “One I would ask you to call upon again.”

“ _NO!_ ” He cringes away from the sight of the thing, his arm thrown up as if to shield himself from a blow. So like the amulet meant to protect him from binding, but _wrong,_ somehow: an unknowing in its depths, the brightness in reverse. It threatens to undo everything. “You want to make me a spirit again, seeing all but standing still, faded, unfeeling. I don’t want to go back— _can_ _’t_ go back.” He thinks of Maryden in the tavern—the warm flush of her laughter, the smile wrinkling the corners of her eyes—and shakes his head frantically. “She would forget, and so would I, but I still have so much to learn.”

“It would return you to your spirit form only temporarily—just long enough to see the Inquisitor’s fate.” Solas steps closer, danging the amulet by its thin chain before him so that it flashes in the torchlight. “I must find out where she has gone; she does not have much time.”

“You want to help her?” Cole asks hesitantly, pushing himself upright again. He can hear the creak of Solas’s jaw as he grinds his teeth and nods. “And it’s only temporary? I’d come back to how I am now, human and whole?”

“Once you let go of the amulet, the Veil will drop once again. Please, my friend,” he adds softly. “This is one wound I could unmake with your help.”

Cole meets Solas’s gaze and regards the dark eyes there, the memories that lie just beneath: the feeling of waking to a cold rain, the taste of old earth in his mouth. Cole’s hand trembles as he reaches out towards Solas’s amulet. He closes his eyes, bracing against the wave of blinding whiteness he knows waits for him on the other side.

His fingertips graze the gem and seize closed around it, and Cole is undone.

 

The spirit flares, tasting powers long-buried, newly known, unbound from body and bone. A glittering expanse of images unfolds before him like the distant canopy of stars. He sees a pale light reflected in the elf’s eyes as he turns his gaze upon him. “You question the path you know you must walk—” he feels himself rise, sees his shadow creep across the elf’s face “—but you fear an ending in the answer.”

The elf closes his eyes and rocks back on his heels as if buffeted by a strong wind but says, “I would hear what happened to her.”

The spirit opens itself to the Fade, where time is but a curling wisp of smoke to be wafted aside; and now he peers into the past, sees Skyhold as it was a year ago. He finds himself in a man’s memory, bound in stolen armor and a borrowed name. He sees the Inquisitor kneeling before him in the grass. A corona of green light limns her left hand as she lays her arm across the headsman’s block and looks up at him, the desperate question in her eyes. He draws his sword, the silver griffon on the pommel slick in his palm as he tests the blade against the crook of her elbow, as gentle as a kiss.

“She holds the pain in her palm,” the spirit tells the elf, the words roaring through him like a thunderous river, swirling streams of the man’s thoughts and memories slipping by as he tries to trap them with his tongue. “It’s spreading faster now: a blight on the body, a fire in the blood. It will kill her to keep the arm, he knows, but he cannot cut her. Too many men sick with fever after sawing, bandaged stumps weeping sweat. _Have Cassandra do it_ , he says to her, but she shakes her head, softly sad, resigned. _Thank you, Thom, for trying_ , she tells him, but he thinks of the noose he slipped and knows living to witness her fall is the crueler fate.”

The winds shift and he sees snows roll over the castle and wither under a pale sun—spring, now, and summer pass over Skyhold in an exhalation. The leaves turn red and drip off black branches. Now, the spirit sees a dwarf climb the stairs to the Inquisitor’s room and cross to her bed. He tells Solas: “He comes to her with helpless poultices and wraps to block the light, brought by his merchants from the farthest reaches of Thedas. He remembers nights in the mage’s clinic, watching as he treated bites and rotten bellies, sickness and black flesh, but never anything like this. Never like this. It smells like the ruins of the Chantry, Blondie’s work, hatred boiled over. A ship waits to carry him across the Waking Sea; this time, finally, he must say goodbye. Kirkwall needs him, he tells her—though, in truth, it’s that only Kirkwall can be repaired.”

The vision fuzzes, and now he is in a different memory, standing at the foot of her bed: a vigil of sorts, a silver sword, the same numb silence. “He came when summoned, wearing the visor of his helm closed so his men do not see him weep,” he tells the elf. In the vision, he bends to press his lips against the Inquisitor’s cheek, his red cape draped over her like a shroud. “ _Stay your messengers,_ she had told him, _the people must think the Inquisitor still stands_. She sleeps silently now, her withered hand cradled to her chest, the Divine’s letter lying forgotten on the nightstand. It makes him think of the little mage so long ago: the whisper of steel through her spine, the pearl sunk in the blood. Gone before he could offer this: a kiss for each cursed fingertip, longing softly sung, but—”

“Enough of the Commander,” the elf snaps. “Go to her.”

The spirit abandons that vision and follows the thread of memory to a farther node, floating into the frail body in the bed, the elf burning with some black magic inside her palm. “She dreams of the wolf with eight eyes,” he tells the elf. “She knows his name now, but it is too late to save her. That old curse: _May the Dread Wolf take her_.” He sees the Grand Enchanter bend over her bed, brandishing her stave. “By the time they try the spell to remove her arm, to stay the spread of madness—”

He sees the memory of the moon soar in the sky, then sink until it is nothing but a ruddy sliver capping the distant mountaintops, then slip beneath the black line of the horizon.

“Nothing but ashes,” the spirit says.

The vision dissolves, and the spirit sees the present again: the elf standing before him with shining eyes, alone in the darkness. The elf’s guard slips, and a single memory spills free: a tangled, panicked thing on broken wings. The spirit catches it, examines it like one holding a gem found in the silt of a riverbed up to the light. “The halves fractured, but you had no words to fuse the fissures,” the spirit says to the elf, though the thought is almost too sharp to speak. “You remember the waterfall: slipping into shadows, the coward with the kiss. Better that she hate the void, you thought, than fall prey to pride. _Ar lasa mala revas_ : the cruelest gift, the kindest knife. You know the hand that killed her was not her own.” Compassion sees the flash of pain cross the elf’s face and desires to make it right. “She forgave you in the end,” it says gently, and wishes for rain to fall upon all the world.

 

Cole’s fingers slip from the amulet suddenly, and it drops to the dust with a thud. “Did it work?” he asks as Solas stoops to pick up the amulet and lingers there, crouched in the shadows, rubbing his eyes in the crook of his elbow when he thinks the boy isn’t looking. “I — I can’t remember what I saw.”

After a moment, Solas stands, the spent amulet dangling uselessly from his fist. “It changes nothing,” he says into the night. He notices Cole watching him and clears his throat. “This cannot have been easy for you. I thank you for what you have done.”

“But I haven’t fixed anything.” Cole pushes himself down from the bale of hay and paces in the dust. “I wanted to help, but it’s all gone wrong, ruined, wracked with a guilt. You’re going to leave again, aren’t you?”

“I have already asked one favor from you; I should not take any more of your time.” Solas draws his hood back over his head. “The path before me is long, and I cannot linger.”

“Are you sure?”

Solas hesitates, then says, “I’m certain.”

Cole searches the hollow in his mind where the spirit resided like one probing a lost tooth with his tongue, searching for some words to right this. He stares into Solas’s eyes, and an image comes to him, unbidden: a torn veil, a tattered shroud, the mountains of Thedas dragged down into a towering cairn. “Please stay,” he pleads. “I can make it better, find some way to mend the pieces, make the words undone. You don’t have to be alone again. It can change.”

Solas’s smile is as sharp as he says: “Men often tell lies to comfort the ones they care for. Rest assured, you are human once again.” His expression softens. “You should return to your singer before she realizes you are gone.” He extinguishes the torch, and the night rushes in over them in a black wave. When Solas shrugs his cloak closer around his shoulders and slips into the night, Cole does not follow.

He returns to the inn on limbs that feel strange, unsteady, tainted in some way. He crosses to the pool of light by the fire and seats himself at Maryden’s feet. He leans against her shins, watching her fingers sweep through the notes of “The Girl in Red Crossing,” humming along gently as she sings:

“ _One last stream to cross, one last hill to wander until I reach the love I'm longing to see_.”

And though the lovers' tale is indeed an unhappy one, he begins to forget the barn, the sadness of the spirit he left behind. Not all songs ended like this. Someday, Varric would understand.


End file.
